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A list of patents filed by Alan Cox. (Note that many of these are just applications and not yet granted.) I’m particularly amused by the application for a patent on DRM. (Note that I can laugh because of Red Hat’s patent pledge.) Now I just need to find a site which will give me an RSS feed of patent applications filtered by assignee…

[Update later: it is clear from my comments that this post wasn’t clear. Let me restate: I think this is a good, or at least not bad thing- RH’s patent pledge makes it very clear that this will not be used against Free Software; and unlike many other mundane RH patents, this one could (hypothetically) be used against Real Bad Guys. I don’t think that it was bad for Alan, or RH, to apply for this patent in a defensive manner.]

Red Hat specifically promises to oppose software patents, but so long as they are in effect they will take patents on their technology to defend Free Software within the existing framework and the licensing for these patents will comply with the terms of the GPL. They specifically promised this, legally binding and all. I really don’t see what the problem is – futhermore I think you should take Red Hats track record into account, have they ever attack an open source developer or project using their patents? No, so why would they start now? Red Hat are pillars of the community and one of strongest supporters we have had historically.

[…] here. Also for the people interested in the ongoing ‘battle’ against DRM, look at the following posting on Luis Villa’s blog. Alan Cox is a kernel maintainer who works for RedHat. This news was later […]